What is "Lean"?

• There are good and bad ways to implement Lean. In the video above, the plot of the 1999 movie, "Office Space" revolves around a company hiring external Lean "experts" to come in & cut the "waste" from their organization, only doing so in an extremely bad way, ranking their employees & laying off the lowest-ranked individuals.

• If Lean is implemented incorrectly within a process or organization, it can ruin people's work & lives.

  • However, when implemented correctly within a process or organization, Lean makes people's work and lives easier & more sustainable.

  • Therefore, we have two different versions of Lean:

    • People-Centric Lean (the "Good" Lean)

      • The belief that making people's lives easier & better allows them to operate at their maximum capability, therefore improving overall productivity, quality, and - as a result - cost

    • Profit-Centric Lean (the "Bad" Lean)

      • Westernized/Americanized implementation of Lean that largely views people as easily-replaceable machines to perform tasks at progressively increased quantity, without 

Scenario: Twice as Fast

• A company uses Lean tools and techniques to improve their manufacturing processes. As a result, the company can make their products twice as fast as before the improvements were implemented. Because they are doing the work so quickly, this means for about half of the day, employees have nothing to do. What should be done about this?

  • Possible People-Centric Lean Company Actions:

    • Send everyone home for the day with full pay after they are done making the products, so they can spend time with family, run errands, enjoy their time, etc.

    • Utilize people's critical thinking for the other half of the day to come up with new ideas, products, improvements, etc.

    • Cross-train employees in other required skills within the organization, to make people more flexible and give them variety of work

    • Upskill employees with entirely new skills/knowledge, so they may bring them into the company and bring even more improvements

  • Possible Profit-Centric Lean Company Actions:

    • Make twice as many products as before, over-producing beyond what their customers actually need - starting a cycle of waste

    • Fire half the employees and have the remaining half do all the work

Good Lean Organizations

• Besides the OG - Toyota - there are many other organizations that have successfully integrated the methodology & practice of Lean into their day-to-day. A few relatively local examples include:

  • FastCAP

    • Located in Ferndale, WA (134mi/215km North of CPTC)

    • Owner Paul Akers is definitely a personality, but he has fully adopted Lean into every aspect of his life, from his work to his travel, health, house, etc.

    • Link: FastCap YouTube Channel

  • Pierson Workholding

    • Located in Simi Valley, CA (1,000mi/1,609km South of CPTC)

    • Owner Jay Pierson - while less dramatic than Paul Akers - has successfully integrated Lean's processes and systems into his entire organization, and all his company's products are tools related to implementing Lean processes, primarily focused on Single-Minute Exchange of Dies (SMED - more on this later in the quarter!)

    • Link: Pierson Workholding YouTube Channel

• You may be thinking, "What is the point of Lean if things like robots exist?"

  • And while it is true the many manual tasks done today can be automated with technology like robots, not all tasks done today should be done - much less done automated

    • For example: If you walk back and forth across a shop to keep getting tools out of a tool box, it would not be effective to have a mobile robot mimic the same task, as that is a wasteful task and there is no value in it doing so

Lean Enables Automation

• The beauty of Lean is that it is a perfect and necessary first-step/lead-in to automation and Industry 4.0

• If processes and systems are not Lean, slapping a robot on them will only marginally improve the output(s) of the process

  • If, however you apply Lean methods, workflows, and techniques, you will improve the process significantly and actually make it easier and more affordable to automate

    • A good example of this the fact that affordable automation does not do a great job of accounting for variation in a process.

      • Lean can reduce or eliminate sources of variation, standardizing the input to allow for simpler, more affordable automation solutions to be utilized rather than expensive, complex automation solutions that can account for high variation